I think when Steven Johnson says that the hypertext link is the first truly new form of punctuation in centuries, he is saying that nothing has so completely altered our culture and the way we view text as the development of the web and the new language that has come along with it. Johnson is right; if somebody from the 1960s were to look at the way we nonchalantly place links within news stories, in books and give mention to Web sites, they would have no idea what we were talking about.
This way of punctuating links () in texts and the very makeup of the link itself (http://www.) is something completely funny to think about interepreting if you don't already know what it means. Since I have grown up seeing this kind of writing and knowing about web lingo it doesn't strike me as weird, but in thinking about another type of writing or punctuation technique that has come along and altered the text we read, it is impossible.
While certain fields of study bring along with them their own jargon and are often creating new terms that are hard to understand, I can't think of a field that has brought with it a new way of punctuating, not just the words themselves.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Monday, February 16, 2009
Messages in the Landscape
For my messages in the landscape, I chose to do showings of opinion around campus. There are a lot of stickers for bands, and opinions on religion and personal choices staring at us that we often don't notice. All the images I took are tied together in that they attempt to get the viewer to believe what they are saying. That you have to always wear condoms, texting will ruin your ability to spell, Square Trio IS good, etc.
Also, most if not all of the messages were posted clearly by students, and in places were students congregate or walk by often.
The message about date abuse, for example was posted on a red flag, a universal sign that something is wrong, and in a place where all residents of the student apartments have to walk by.
Also, most if not all of the messages were posted clearly by students, and in places were students congregate or walk by often.
The message about date abuse, for example was posted on a red flag, a universal sign that something is wrong, and in a place where all residents of the student apartments have to walk by.
Proust and the Squid
Reading "Proust and the Squid" reminded me of an honors class, I think honors 230, freshman year about brain development. We read about a girl who had been locked in a closet her whole life until she was discovered at 13 and she had very low comprehension of anything and knew little about the outside world, much I guess like "The Allegory of the Cave."
I recalled several other texts we studied in that class while reading "Proust and the Squid," since it deals heavily with the way the brain develops and how reading has changed the very ability and ways in which we communicate.
I found it interesting that reading, apparently, was never meant to be and that it even "altered the intellectual evolution of our species."
I never thought about the ways that the "neuronal connections" are different for what language we read in, for example that the way the brain processes Chinese is different from the way it processes English.
The most compelling part of the reading for me was on page 155 and the Hermann Hesse quote that was given: "For every thinking person each verse of each poet will show a new and different face every few years, will awaken a different resonance in him. The great and mysterious thing about reading experience is this: the more discriminatingly, the more sensitively, and the more associatively we learn to read the more clearly we see every thought and every poem in it's uniqueness, it's individuality in it's precise limitations."
I always find that as time goes on certain passages of reading or lyrics or poems begin to change in their meanings to me. I always thought of it in the way that experiences we have continue to change and so if somebody were to die between the time we first read something and the second time we do so, the meaning would be different but I never really thought of it in the way that things change because the way we learned to read and the way we continue to develop our reading skills is evolving.
I recalled several other texts we studied in that class while reading "Proust and the Squid," since it deals heavily with the way the brain develops and how reading has changed the very ability and ways in which we communicate.
I found it interesting that reading, apparently, was never meant to be and that it even "altered the intellectual evolution of our species."
I never thought about the ways that the "neuronal connections" are different for what language we read in, for example that the way the brain processes Chinese is different from the way it processes English.
The most compelling part of the reading for me was on page 155 and the Hermann Hesse quote that was given: "For every thinking person each verse of each poet will show a new and different face every few years, will awaken a different resonance in him. The great and mysterious thing about reading experience is this: the more discriminatingly, the more sensitively, and the more associatively we learn to read the more clearly we see every thought and every poem in it's uniqueness, it's individuality in it's precise limitations."
I always find that as time goes on certain passages of reading or lyrics or poems begin to change in their meanings to me. I always thought of it in the way that experiences we have continue to change and so if somebody were to die between the time we first read something and the second time we do so, the meaning would be different but I never really thought of it in the way that things change because the way we learned to read and the way we continue to develop our reading skills is evolving.
Monday, February 9, 2009
Human Consciousness
When Walter Ong says that "more than any other single invention, writing has transofrmed human consciousness," on page 78 of "Orality and Literacy," he means that the way we see writing (i.e. the typeface it's in, the color, the shape, the spacing), affects how we interpret the passage. One of the most eye-opening parts of Ong's book, for me, was the way that I've never thought about how the way the words look subconsciously change the way I think of the passage.
Before we had all the technology that we do today, speeches were held in high regard by the general public as the main means to convey and share ideas and thoughts. When the spoken word began to be put down on paper, there began to be more than just the words to consider. All the things I mentioned above, the typeface, spacing, etc., gave people more things to consider. It made people aware of the ways in which writing had the ability to do more than spoken word, it could convey meanings through the way it looked.
I don't even know if this is a legitimate comparison, but cell phones were an invention that also opened up human consciousness. Before there were cell phones, there were people who relied on landlines to talk and before that there was just snail mail. People now realize that they can walk out of the house and always be connected to somebody through their cell phone. They can check their e-mail, listen to music, or call somebody up from anywhere and we've come to rely on that. The way we plan things now is different, our whole consciousness has shifted to where we don't make plans before leaving the house, we can just call and make plans, we don't have to worry about maps or writing down information we may need because we can look it up online via cell phone.
While these two inventions, writing and cell phones, are very different, they have both shaped the way that we either interpret what we're seeing or the way in which we go about our daily lives...if that makes any sense...
Before we had all the technology that we do today, speeches were held in high regard by the general public as the main means to convey and share ideas and thoughts. When the spoken word began to be put down on paper, there began to be more than just the words to consider. All the things I mentioned above, the typeface, spacing, etc., gave people more things to consider. It made people aware of the ways in which writing had the ability to do more than spoken word, it could convey meanings through the way it looked.
I don't even know if this is a legitimate comparison, but cell phones were an invention that also opened up human consciousness. Before there were cell phones, there were people who relied on landlines to talk and before that there was just snail mail. People now realize that they can walk out of the house and always be connected to somebody through their cell phone. They can check their e-mail, listen to music, or call somebody up from anywhere and we've come to rely on that. The way we plan things now is different, our whole consciousness has shifted to where we don't make plans before leaving the house, we can just call and make plans, we don't have to worry about maps or writing down information we may need because we can look it up online via cell phone.
While these two inventions, writing and cell phones, are very different, they have both shaped the way that we either interpret what we're seeing or the way in which we go about our daily lives...if that makes any sense...
Orality and Literacy
"If a picture is worth a thousand words, why is it a saying?" writes Walter Ong in his book "Orality and Literacy." I found Ong's book and his analysis of oral culture and the differences between orality and writing and the changes brought about in thought and expression with writing to be the opposite of what I would have thought. Having grown up in a more reading and writing centric culture, it was interesting to read about orality and the fact that writing chiefly depends upon orality: "oral expression can exist and mostly has existed without any writing at all, writing never without orality."
While reading about the historical aspects of orality and writing was educational, I was most interested in chapter five, “Print, Space and Closure.” As I said in my other post responding to the film “Helvetica,” I have truly never thought about the texts that are all around me or the impact spacing and written word has upon consciousness.
The thought that we often think that all text involves sight and sound and we think that reading is a visual activity that makes us think of sounds, it’s weird to think of it the way that early printers thought of it; that reading is a listening process that begins with sight.
I never paid attention to the way I see the things I read in my head, for example how Ong said that when you say “nevertheless” to somebody, they usually can’t go a minute without thinking of the letters involved in the word.
Chapter five of the book reiterated a lot of the things we’ve been talking about in class about how the position of text on a page and even the white space contribute to the overall meaning of it.
I checked out George Herbert’s poem, The Altar…
The Altar
A broken ALTAR, Lord thy servant rears,
Made of a heart, and cemented with teares:
Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;
No workmans tool hath touch'd the same
A HEART alone
Is such a stone,
As nothing but
Thy pow'r doth cut.
Wherefore each part
Of my hard heart
Meets in this frame,
To praise thy Name:
That if I chance to hold my peace,
These stones to praise thee may not cease.
O let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine,
And sanctifie this ALTAR to be thine.
This reminds me of creative writing class in high school where we used to look at poems by people like e.e. cummings who took advantage of spacing (http://www-scf.usc.edu/~thier/ee/#found).
This is why for last class’ project I chose to focus on spacing more than changing fonts up, it’s so much harder to use spacing to convey meaning and it’s cool that poems or works of writing are often more than just the words, it’s everything involved in the printing like Ong talks about in Chapter five.
And oh, the technology we have today! Trying to understand what it was like for people back in the days of the Lincoln-Douglas debates is almost impossible for somebody who has grown up in such a technologically advanced time.
While reading about the historical aspects of orality and writing was educational, I was most interested in chapter five, “Print, Space and Closure.” As I said in my other post responding to the film “Helvetica,” I have truly never thought about the texts that are all around me or the impact spacing and written word has upon consciousness.
The thought that we often think that all text involves sight and sound and we think that reading is a visual activity that makes us think of sounds, it’s weird to think of it the way that early printers thought of it; that reading is a listening process that begins with sight.
I never paid attention to the way I see the things I read in my head, for example how Ong said that when you say “nevertheless” to somebody, they usually can’t go a minute without thinking of the letters involved in the word.
Chapter five of the book reiterated a lot of the things we’ve been talking about in class about how the position of text on a page and even the white space contribute to the overall meaning of it.
I checked out George Herbert’s poem, The Altar…
The Altar
A broken ALTAR, Lord thy servant rears,
Made of a heart, and cemented with teares:
Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;
No workmans tool hath touch'd the same
A HEART alone
Is such a stone,
As nothing but
Thy pow'r doth cut.
Wherefore each part
Of my hard heart
Meets in this frame,
To praise thy Name:
That if I chance to hold my peace,
These stones to praise thee may not cease.
O let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine,
And sanctifie this ALTAR to be thine.
This reminds me of creative writing class in high school where we used to look at poems by people like e.e. cummings who took advantage of spacing (http://www-scf.usc.edu/~thier/ee/#found).
This is why for last class’ project I chose to focus on spacing more than changing fonts up, it’s so much harder to use spacing to convey meaning and it’s cool that poems or works of writing are often more than just the words, it’s everything involved in the printing like Ong talks about in Chapter five.
And oh, the technology we have today! Trying to understand what it was like for people back in the days of the Lincoln-Douglas debates is almost impossible for somebody who has grown up in such a technologically advanced time.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Helvetica
Before watching “Helvetica,” I never gave a second glance to the types of fonts that adorned the signs, ads and products that I see and use every day, but after seeing this whole culture of font and the impact it has on onlookers, this past week I began to take a little more notice of the fonts that were, quite literally, all around me. All the George Mason University signs I see every day, telling me the names of buildings, the numbers of the rooms, the instructions beside the phones and equipment telling professors to call tech support if anything goes wrong were all presented in a very clean font, official and easily readable.
Also before watching Helvetica and doing the class reading I usually never noticed the formation of the words either. I tend to think, as I think more people commonly do, that spacing and sentence formation and alignment are not the things to use when trying to be expressive, automatically I would think to change the font to some goofy bold, loud font to show meaning. Therefore, I found it interesting to listen to the side of the veteran typographers who were all about Helvetica. As they said, Helvetica says everything; by messing with the spacing between letters and words and changing the font ever so slightly it is possible to convey a whole new message. Helvetica, according to them, makes other fonts completely superfluous. Just hearing this, I wouldn’t believe it, but to actually see the examples was weird to me, the signature signs of companies like American Apparel that they showed and the subway signs in New York City truly did convey different messages, and I found it odd that I had never even considered the messages signs were screaming out at me.
Although I saw their point — that Helvetica truly can in a sense convey a wide range of emotions — I preferred the designs made by some of the newer typographers who were experimenting with font and spacing in new ways.
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